WELL,we mentioned in the last chapter that we had once traveled in Russia. Actually, we traveled to a lot of places over the years, and at this remove I begin to find it a bit hard to remember which trip preceded and which followed in time...
No real matter, I suppose but with the caveat that I may be relating somethings out of chronological order here, I'll plunge right on. The beauty of this type of domain posting is that should some forgotten fact present itself to me later, I can always reshuffle the order on these "chapters"... but that's neither here nor there for now.
I believe our Russian trip was more toward the last here, but not really sure. And it was not solely to Russia: it was a Grand Tour of the Scandanavian countries really: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and then Russia. Of course we went in the Summer, so never saw the fierce cold there but we saw lots of other "fierce" things. These are storybook lands...
I believe we must have had a through flight from Kennedy (NYC) straight to Copenhagen (Kobenhaven) Denmark. The plane took off around sundown (a night flight) and headed out into the rosy banked cloud decks offshore over the Atlantic. A cocktail or two and Little Bernard was soon sound asleep and snoring away. At Copenhagen, the Tour Bus met us and took us to our Hotel. I don't remember a whole lot: I think Denmark was largely "unstructured", as they say, and this part of the trip was pretty much up to us to do our own sightseeing. I know we sought out and viewed the famous Little Mermaid statue commemorating Hans Christensen Anderson's beloved childhood story. (Complete with head all nicely brazed back on from where some lunatic had hacksawed it off one time: not all the crazies live in the US!).
I remember walking along a brick-paved quay and the beautiful old homes lining the many canals of the city. Actually I think it is said that the Royal Court way back when, greatly admired the Dutch cities with their superior canal systems and all and so imported Dutch engineers to design a grand canal system for Copenhagen and before they were done, they had managed to impart a "Dutch look" on even the housing and associated architecture of the place making it sort of the Amsterdam of the North. Something like that...
Many characterize the Danish as the more erratic of the Scandanavians even calling them the "French of the North". Certain it is they have somewhat more refined and sophisticated tastes and tend toward the "good life." And far as I am concerned they are like the French in other ways, too: when we were there nearly the whole country was "on strike" for one perceived peeve or another including much to my disappointment, the famed restored Viking town of Rothskilde outside Copenhagen with its collection of Viking ships and other memorabilia. So we contented ourselves with watching the Changing of the Guard at the palace (one of four there!)... the Guards for all the world like those at the Palace in London, popping in and out of their littleGuard Boxes shelters -with stiff and over-exaggerated "robotic" movements.
That night we joined some of our fellow tourists and all went to a quayside Danish restaurant that had been highly recommended. I remember it was just a short distance beyond the statue of the "Old Fisherwoman" (they are bigtime into waterfront statues there! LOL!). Our party went in and was seated at a nice table. It was decided we would all order up a "typical" Danish dinner.
Soon, the waitress arrived and began setting plates in front of everyone, mounded up with a pure white custard-appearing substance on them garnished perhaps with a sprig of parsley. We all picked up our forks (spoons maybe) and prepared to dive in.... when someone asked the waitress what it was.
"Lard," she said.
Just like that!
"Lard?" gasped 10 voices at once. To the accompaniement of ten forks (and/or spoons...) hitting the table at the same time.
What a riot! Naturally, there was big hubub and one (porky) American guy turned bright red in the face and delivered a sort of "Ugly American" speech about the "dangers" of eating lard fat, blah, blah, blah. The waitress had heard it all many times before, and began to collect the plates...except for several who kept them to one side as "spread" for the bread and rolls to come. LOL "lard" ain't lard I guess when it is a spread and not a first course!...
Later, we took in Tivoli - perhaps one of the oldest amusement parks in the World, and certainly the best known in Europe. It is famous for its flowers and rides, fireworks, and all the usual. (Shades of Elitch Gardens, which we have visited earlier in Chapter Five, Book____). And shades of more recent memory: Tivoli came through WWII relatively unscathed (the Nazi occupiers being Germans for all that and Germans love their "biergartens"...LOL!). And I remember when I was stationed in North Germany in the so-called British Sector at Bremerhaven at the end of the War, furloughs became available to take a night train and go to Copenhagen. And many and detailed were the tales of delight brought back by the relatively lucky few who managed to land one of these furloughs. "Tivoli" was the be-all and end-all of conversations in our barracks... returnee's from this fairyland always got an immediate "hearing" to tell we less fortunates what we were missing. I had never gotten such furlough myself (being usually on permanent KP for some infraction or another...) but here I was years later, at long last: a substantial citizen in my own right, and set to tour the grounds of Tivoli on my own
All this I was relating to Millie as we sat outside on a bench beside the beautiful flower gardens before we entered this Magic Kingdom. And just then, a Dane came by and stopping a short distance beyond us, began to urinate in the flowers. Since sophisticate that I am as I DID once have a memorable furlough in Paris with its delightful pisoirs along the Boulevards, this didn't bother me all that much. And Mill was naturally unflappable in most ways anyhow. Yes, the Danes ARE like the French in many ways. Maybe though, it's just that some things in Europe, you see, never change.
The next day we left for Finland, pulling out into the famed Skaggerat Strait where Vikings in their Dragon Ships had once rowed these same waters. Off our port side some distance away sprawled Elsinore the famed castle works chosen by Shakespeare as the setting for his Hamlet that most unhappy Dane of all. We were booked on one of those famed "Baltic Cruise Ships" run by the Poles or somebody. Big, boxy monstrous things with hordes of backpacking Eastern Europeans on them rucksacks and all! Fleets of Yugots and other vehicles beloved of the Eastern mind jammed aboard... all crooked and in confusion on the auto deck. (Remember the Yugot?...somebody tried to import them here for a while: I recall that among other dismaying features to American buyers, was a gigantic first aid kit that came with the car complete with professional broken-leg traction splints, packaged blood plasma, crutches, needles and sutures and even anesthetics, all packed neatly in back! Now that's creative merchandising if nothing else...!).
In the evening, after sundown, a number of bandrooms and dance floors opened on the various decks and each one featured a Polski-type band playing Polkas of course (reminded me of Eastern Connecticut and its Polack clubs and bars as I once knew them...Yhip! Yhip! Yhip! Da-Da-Da-DA-da Da-Da-Dee-Dee-Dum) and the throng many with rucksacks still on! polka'd en masse all night long from from wall to wall. You haven't lived till you have cruised the Baltic on one of those ships!
I managed to polish off a bottle of wine at supper and later I went on deck alone with the empty bottle. (Capitalists among my readers are going to love this one: Democrats and Lefties are just going to sniff and say "Bernie-the-UglyAmerican" - so what else is new?). We had been told before boarding that we might see Russian submarines occasionally following in our wake: it seems that at the time, the Reds were hungry for every scrap of info they could get on Americans and the Ways of the West, and so they had taken to scooping up the Baltic Cruise ships' garbage to see what they might glean from this source...
At the time, I had a few wallet cards that I had made up once for my hobby blacksmith activities back home. They had a little logo on them of an anvil and smith hammering away and the name of my shop "Weeping Heart Forge" (taken from an old German design element I often employed...). So I got a scrap of paper and pencil and I composed a short note that went something like this:
"Greetings, Comrade Tovarish!
I , Bernie Powellinski, am happy I am announcing already yet that I am qualified blacksmithinski and fix many things! We can hammer out dents in sub hulls, we are straightening main shafts when Comrade Sailors bump docks and whales and American ships and mines! We are charging Americaninski dollars only but will discount rubles! No personal checks! No atomic reactor work, if so pleasing you and no missile-parts work: traditional smithing only. For estimates: contact me at my USA address!
Spacebo!"
I then put this note, along with my card in the empty wine bottle, corked it up and tossed it over in the moonlight. I watched our wake a long time but never saw a periscope...LOL! But I have fantasized often over the finding of this bottle by some "Red Oktober" types maybe... the bottle fished out, carried below to the operations con the Russki sailors crowding around in the dim red glow of the battle lamps the bottle is uncorked the Captain (who reads English) shakes out the note and begins to read....
Sigh...
The next day we docked at Helsinki. A very modern, bright city and the Finns were very friendly folk, well educated for the most part and almost all spoke English. We saw the sights but truth to tell, I don't really recall them for the moment, save one place and I cannot recall the name of the (famed) architect who lived there. But it was his (restored, I guess) home one that he had designed himself. It was very interesting and a blend of "mod" ideas and trends and old traditional things...
For instance, as you walked around the grounds, you would come across park benches here and there and seated on them would be real "fool-the-eye" lifelike dummies of various persons. (I have seen this later in some US cities, too, now but I believe this guy is credited with this novel approach to "lawn ornamentation." Best of all, what I recall, was a sort of elongated "party room" or dining hall or somesuch he had designed under this house and it was done to include various features found by historians and archeologists in excavated Viking ruins. One such being a row of large iron rings set into the wall down one side of the room at about shoulder-height. To my query of the guide as to what these were for, he replied that the Vikings did this sort of thing as an aid to when they had drunk too much in their (continuous) drinking orgies and were in danger of falling down. At such times, they would then grab one of the rings and hang on for dear life thus continuing to remain on their feet and drinking! The architect had copied even this detail down to the last iron bolt!
"Skoal to the Northland", I say!
Scandanavia is a contradiction in terms and cultures in many ways. West to East you have Norway, Sweden and Denmark and Finland. (Some would exclude the Finns mainly on the grounds that they speak an entirely different (roots) language but this hardly makes sense since a Western Norwegian cannot understand an Eastern Dane anyhow and their ancient cultures were all more uniform...). West Norwegians cannot understand Swedes (who border in the East). But some central Norwegians understand Swedes but most do not while most Eastern Norwegians understand Western Swedes and so it progresses in like fashion Sweden to Denmark (none of whom understand any Norwegian!) and then to the Finlanders whom no one understands! LOL! But that's not all: of this "community" of Nations, it is a fact that two (Norway and Denmark) were invaded (by Hitler) in WWII, while one remained neutral (Sweden), and one "joined" the Axis (Finland) to fight with the Germans in a perceived opportunity to kick the Russians in their sore leg for earlier having invaded them!
"War makes strange bedfellows!" indeed....
One thing I do remember about Helsinki, is the vast number of Russian ships which I saw for the first time jamming the harbor there. The big Hammer-and-Sickle emblem emblazoned on all their stacks. This seemed odd so I asked a Finn why this was. He grinned (their contempt for their big bully neighbor is not often concealed) and said, "Oh! Those are icebreakers, Mister. And they all need to be repaired before the onset of next winter's freeze-up. But the Russkis are totally unable to repair their own ships, so they bring them here and we fix them and charge them good, you betcha!"
The Worker's Paradise apparently had a few chinks in it...
So a day or so later, we entrained for ...Russia.
You need to understand something. At the time we visited Russia, "Glasnost" was just a-borning. Amerikaninskis were tolerated - but just barely, and were seen mainly as a peculiar sort of "friendly enemy." Tours to Russia via the Scandanavian countries, had to be arranged through Intourist, I think it was - The Soviet Travel Agency - founded (no less!) by Joseph Stalin himself way back when. LOL! Got the picture?
The way it worked was this: they took us down to the Helsinki Railroad Station. Here was this long row of passenger cars on a rail siding off by itself fenced and gated. They were boxy, cumbersome looking cars, painted dark green and had that ineffable "military" air about them (take it from an old trooptrain traveller of yore here...). Prominently emblazoned on each in mid-car, of course, was the Russian hammer-and-sickle. Code numbers and notations here and there were in the Cyrillic alphabet. I suddenly had the feeling we were getting to be a long way from home...
We boarded the cars (and once boarded the guards would never let you out again! Nyet!). They were the European layout with the aisle down one side and individual "roomettes" one after another opening down the other side. Eventually, the long string gave a jerk, then began to move faster and faster and we were on our way! We sped along through a gorgeous, prosperous looking countryside. Rich, well-kept farms dotted the landscape and there were numerous cars on the well-paved and maintained highways. It could have been heartland America but it was just rural Finland this side of the Russian border.
I remember seeing a track maintenance crew working alongside the route. Their little track-worker's transport was neatly parked off to one side on a spur; the crew themselves were dressed in protective clothing and had helmets on they were using automatic weed choppers and a chainsaw or two...
Then the farms suddenly stopped. Dense, gloomy, unkempt pine forests closed in. On we sped mile after mile. Then suddenly there was a clearing kind of like a fire break back home in our Western Forests. It had been crudely but cleanly chopped right through all the pines and underbrush and down one side ran an endless high-wire, barbwire fence. At intervals I could see observation posts off in the distance raised on sturdy log beams like fire outlooks back home. Intuition told me however, these were not for spotting fires...
The cut flashed by and closed up had I not been looking out the window, I would have missed it. I surmised this was maybe the border we had crossed, but I had seen no posted signs. Then I happened to notice the change in maintenance alongside the tracks: where just a few miles back there were mowed weeds and clean-cut stumps right to the ground here there were great patches of weed and hacked-off tree stumps sticking up all at random twisted and broken and one could see they were the result of very indifferent axe work. Then around the bend we saw the maintenance crew: they were all on foot and they were all middle-aged women in peasant garb just like you see in the movies, and they all wore babushkas (the national bonnet over there!) and they were all bent over working with their bare hands and one or two were swinging big axes at the saplings!
"Without a doubt," I said as I turned to Millie, "we have crossed the border into the Motherland!"
(And now, since Roosha, whether friend or foe, is not Roosha without its repetoire of instant change happy/sad, fast/slow Folk Songs (to which actually, I am much addicted...), here are a few strains from "Kalinka" - a traditional little tune to get you in the mood. (You must DOUBLE-click the start button!) We shall be salting-and-peppering our account with such Midi tidbits in the passages yet to come...). And remember now, when stopped in the street and asked a question, you must always respond by first saying: